I often find myself doing things from deep within the wilds of text-only ssh sessions, sometimes from systems which even lack X. I wind up occasionally browsing the web in Lynx, and script Lynx to pull things for me besides.

Forums are usually best avoided in text-only mode... but today I noticed the "lo-fi" link at the bottom of the page and... Its awesome. Way awesome. Its even awesome in a full-blown browser, actually.

Anyway, kudos and thanks. very few forums provide a usable low-fi/accessible style. And anyway, this almost gives me 300baud nostalgia (anybody remember Spitfire, Renegade or Green Door BBS software back when OS/2 was still new?)

The centered CODE text is the most important one, as it makes indented code very difficult to understand -- an indented <blockquote> instead of a centered style might make more sense there. Taking a look at the generated tags, CODE and QUOTE blocks are embedded in a table that gets inserted into the post body with this tag: <table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'> . If the alignment bit were removed the problem would disappear, and if a left margin were introduced it could be block-quoty while still being a table.

As for the lack of <br/><br/>... it turns out that <br><br> is present in the HTML, but without a docstring telling the browser what its looking at the browsers default to quirks mode, where un-terminated unary tag behavior is not well defined (<br> VS <br/>). A universal solution here could be to add a substitution rule s/(\n\n)/</p><p>/ before the rule s/\n/<br>/ -- or something along those lines.

I just looked at the mobile theme in a normal browser -- I could imagine it being great on mobile Opera, but in a real browser its comically cute. Hehehe.

I noticed that the invocation method is different between the two -- low-fi appends a directory prefix and mobile sets GET data to indicate the mobile theme. A common approach that simply shifts between CSS might be helpful for maintenance and ease of future changes. Of course, this might be a major be a pita if the concepts are coming from two very different histories, especially if one of the three versions is served by a different system that calls the same DB but has nothing else in common or whatever.

I can appreciate the difficulty of cleaning the dust out of the corners of a largish project -- these are just thoughts.

Regardless, I'm still thrilled that there are decent options for text/tiny browsing -- I've nearly given up on forums behaving in a sane way on minimal browsers.

Thanks for the feedback. Lo-Fi is actually a feature of invision power board that they decided to do away with, but we chose to maintain it and keep it working as well as added a few nifty things to it.

A lot of forum software that used to have lo-fi versions have chosen to phase them out or just get rid of them in favor of complete mobile versions. We were going to do the same thing because earlier this year we launched our web based mobile mode but too many users still enjoyed it so it's there to stay.

The Lo-Fi is in fact in a different directory on the server, yes, and it taps into the same database as the forums. It has a completely different skin set, but so does ?act=Mobile. Although the HTML for the posts is the same. I can see about removing that center attribute and into the BRs, but the BBCode parser is a little weird... I just have to make sure I don't break old quotes.